An apology; The blog drought

On February 22, 2011 in General, Nottingham Trent University.
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University work. That’s the reason Iv’e fallen off the blogosphere recently. It’s been a really busy time, with birthday celebrations, university work and tight deadlines. Unfortunately I had to put blogging on the back-burner for a while!

But now I’m back, and have lots to talk about! In fact, as a signal of my return to the world of blogging, Iv’e bashed out three short articles on the work iv’e been concentrating on as part of my final year; Advanced Analysis and Design, Software Engineering, Business Analysis, Real-Time Analysis & Design and Project Management.

Iv’e tried to catagorise similar modules, using my own personal grouping criteria;

Advanced Analysis & Design and Software Engineering [The 'geeky' ones]
Business Analysis and Project Management [The 'business' ones]
Human Computer Interaction and RealTime Analysis & Design [The 'other' ones]

Of cause, there is also my Final Year Dissertation which I’ve been working on at points, which you can keep up to date with HERE.

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Human Computer Interaction and RTAD

On February 22, 2011 in General.
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human computer interactionRealTime Analysis and Design is very similar to Advanced Analysis and Design (See Here) and as such is only a half year (10 credit point) module. It focuses on realtime systems, the advantages, disadvantages and analysing them in order to come to real world results which can be used to justify critical system decisions.

Human Computer Interaction was all about the front end user interface and required students to design a direct manipulation training system (an interface which allows dragging, dropping, manipulating elements etc much like the Windows desktop). I opted to produce a cottage pie, and the interface (designed in flash) worked well with this concept. The user had the option and freedom to chop the ingredients as they liked, and simple steps ensured there was no serious error when replicating in a real kitchen.

This was a hard module to get to grips on, as I had no previous experience in Flash. I worked on this for the majority of the christmas holidays (including Christmas day!) but it was definitely worth it as I scored 78%, a solid 1st, which was the highest in the year! Proof that hard work pays off!

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Human Computer Interaction: What is ‘Usability’?

On October 7, 2010 in Development, Website Design.
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I’ve just had a really interesting lecture, the first of the year, about Human-Computer Interaction. The princible of making software (and hardware, for that matter) more usable is one which many developers (whether it be software engineers, website developers or data analysists) strugle with.

So, what is ‘Usability’? It’s a term which is thrown around more than a frisby in a game of ‘Disk-Golf‘, but rarely explored and focused upon when designing a website, software or new device.

Usability takes four main aspects into consideration, not just humans and computers like the module title would have you beleive. These are People (or Users), Activities (or Tasks), Context (the Environment) and finally Technology. People, Activities and Technology are all interlinked, and are largly controlled via the Environment.

Let’s put this into a real situation. Say for example I was designing a new library system for a client. The people involved would be the clients prospective or existing customers (Question: Who do you design the site for? Answer: Have a log-in area!). The activities could be anything from checking availability to ordering a book, viewing the abstract or renewing the return date. Context is a hard one, and would need considerable user reaserch, but it’s safe to say this software could be ran from home, work, on a mobile device and in the library itself. For this reason almost all external distractions could effect the way the system is used – so it must be designed to be ‘user friendly’ to mimimize errors. Finally there is the technology.

So, what is ‘Usability’? Well, a usable user interface should be acceptable for the people. I.e. It should fit around the users, rather than users having to ajust to the software. Secondly, it must be appropiate for the activities. (A really fancy UI with animations and fancy graphics probably isn’t necessary for a library booking system!). Finally, it must be suitable for the context in which it is used.

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CAPTCHA on blogs

On February 1, 2010 in Website Design.
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Opened wp-admin page this morning to find 65 comments. Thought for a moment that I may have had a huge responce to a post but it turns out that over 80% of them were spam! Time for a bit of spam prevention.

I used a simple CAPTCHA wordpress plugin which doesn’t require real people to input any characters and garuntees 100% success. I’m not holding my breath. If the plugin doesn’t work I’ll have to resport to user-input methods to decide between bots and the living, which I don’t perticularly like doing. However, desperate times and all that.

CAPTCHA software has always got my back up; Just seem’s like there could be better ways to determine between the two sources. However I’m starting to think that WordPress should include CAPTCHA as default to it’s posts… something I didn’t think i’d ever admit!

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